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Save Our Community was founded in the movement to resist Wal-Mart's development in Rosemead, California. Now, it has become a general site for news, information, gossip, talk, and blogging about Rosemead. We also have stories about South San Gabriel, San Gabriel, Montebello, and occasionally about Pico Rivera, El Monte, South El Monte, Alhambra, Temple City, and other nearby communities. Your host is Todd. If you want a blog just sign up, get approved, and start writing. Good posts will be moved onto the home page.

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More on CAL Poultry

A much better article on the city's surrender to CAL Poultry appeared in the LA Times today. The Times puts this defeat for the city in the context of Maggie Clark sending out scary postcards about Avian Flu, and her proposal to require English translators for programs at the city recreational facilities, and the fact that the city was forced to settle with the US Department of Justice over Voting Rights Act violations.

Add it all up, and of course we can see that it was racism (or, at the very least, the exploitation of racist attitudes among some residents) that motivated Maggie Clark's war on poultry.

CAL Poultry came to the city four or five years ago, volunteering to do all of these things that Sandra Armenta is saying is some great victory for the city. Rather than trying to work out a solution then, Maggie Clark and her allies (including, yes Armenta and Steven Ly) cost the city thousands of dollars on useless litigation to try to shut them down.

In the past decade, hipster foodies have gotten into doing two things that the more "country" residents of the west SGV have been doing continually since it became a suburb: raising chickens, and growing food in the front yard.

It's one of those all-too-common situations where immigrant or "country" behaviors are rejected or dissed by the mainstream. Then, some white trendsetters, usually educated and fairly affluent or elite trendsetters, take up one of these behaviors. Before long, it's all over Brooklyn (or Silver Lake, or Echo Park, or the Mission). Everyone's raising chickens.

And then they recover some sense of history and instead of observing that this gauche behavior was being performed by contemporary non-hipsters, they attribute their behavior to reconstructing some aspect of their own ancestry, like their grandparents or great grandparents.

Maybe now, they'll get into eating freshly killed bird... you know, like the way Vietnamese and immigrant Latinos like to do.